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A Fond Look at Some Obsolete Ports
StealMyWiFi writes "C-NET.co.uk has a lighthearted look at ten of the best obsolete ports. The biggest surprise is that C-NET claims Firewire is obsolete, which will come as a surprise to the millions of people worldwide who are still using it, especially in light of the story that Firewire is due to get a massive speed boost! The same could be said for their claims about SCSI, although from a consumer point of view I guess that's fairer."
C-net couldn't find an obsolete port with two hands, a map and a flashlight.
SCSI wasn't any fun anymore once they put in auto termination anyway. Long ago are the days when you couldn't get your SCSI disks to show up, no matter how you chained them or where you put the terminator. The only way to get it working was to cut yourself trying to connect the third drive for the 500th time and bleed all over the cables while swearing loudly. After that, everything would work just fine. You see, the dark lord will not allow SCSI to work without a blood sacrifice.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
Netcraft confirmed their obsoletism years ago.
Describing SCART as a bad idea is very unfair. It's true you couldn't tell which signals were being monitored (unless a sophisticated TV would tell you), but consider this : thanks to SCART compliance, all European TVs on from the early-to-mid 80s were component RGB monitors. This was great for the consoles and home computers of the time. In the US at the same time, TVs only had RF inputs, and only later on the mediocre composite and S-video inputs, and only in the late 90s - early 2000s, and on higher end TVs saw component input generalized. And then not RGB component, rather that inferior differential component. So SCART has forced european TVs a twenty years headstart on the quality of analog input and changed the experience of everyone with a TV-based home computer in the 80s.
Also it was bi-directionnal : a composite signal could travel from the TV to the peripheral and be simultaneously fed back from the peripheral to the TV. This allowed over-the-air pay-TV with a de-scrambler box that was simply plugged in on one of the SCARTs.
SCSI is faaaar from dead. Actually, SCSI is dominating the market currently, killing all the competition. Except it's done with weird parallel buses with 50 different incompatible connectors. And it changed the name, but it's still the same old SCSI protocol.
;) CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs use it.
* ATAPI is SCSI over ATA - all non-SATA (or non-SCSI
* SATA is SCSI over a special serial cable. Meaning - only obsolete PATA disks are non-SCSI. All CD drives are SCSI this or another way.
* USB Storage (pendrives, external drives etc) are all SCSI.
Essentially mostly every mass storage device you connect to the computer is SCSI nowadays.
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He is going to built in the future, he is like totally super advanced by today's standards. Can a USB port whisk an omelette? NO! Can a SATA port trim a hedge? NO! Can a PCI-Express port vaccum off the sofa? NO!!!!
If you want a port that can interface with anything and do almost anything and plug into almost any sort of appliance, just ask Kryten to dry hump it and your wish will be fulfilled!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
When USB actually works for audio/video, I'll be impressed. If you've ever hung out on an audio board trying to help people with computer problems, you find two things are consistently true: 1. People with FireWire audio interfaces rarely have problems that can't be clearly and quickly pinned on a poor choice of FireWire card. 2. People with USB audio interfaces constantly have problems with random pops and crackles. There are exceptions to both rules, but the difference in reliability is staggering.
And video cameras basically just plain don't use USB at all. You might find a few camcorders that provide USB for reading still photos off of flash cards, but that's about it. Okay, so there are a few low-end flash-based MPEG solutions out there. None of the better gear (e.g. HDV) uses USB, though. It's all FireWire. Outside of really low-end gear, USB isn't even in the running.
The thing is, IMHO, what's really dead is USB 2. For disks, eSATA kicks its butt every day and twice on Sunday, bus-powered disks notwithstanding (and even that limitation is changing RSN). Thus, eSATA will likely obliterate USB for external drives in the fairly near future, for both cost and performance reasons. For A/V tasks, FireWire leaves USB in the dust. The only devices USB supports well are input devices like tablets, mice, and keyboards. As a result, USB 3 will probably be largely or completely stillborn, and USB will eventually be relegated to slow devices like flash sticks, keyboards, and mice, as it really doesn't do anything else very well....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
That's pretty much a good rule of thumb everywhere in life.
... and that is the last time Neil was allowed at the data center.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Did you lick the male connectors or the female connectors?
Which is, considering there's about eight people living in rural north america, a very likely option.
Flip that around and I doubt you'll agree: Microsoft Windows has an almost ubiquitous presence, which translates into....
USB is ubiquitous in terms of the port being provided. It is not remotely ubiquitous in terms of devices that connect to it except in the consumer space. Even there, however, it is already starting to fade away in many areas. More and more printers are starting to offer networking capabilities built-in, up to and including Wi-Fi in many cases. Most homes don't just have one computer anymore, so the days of having a cheap USB printer hooked to the computer don't cut it. In the keyboard/mouse arena, Bluetooth is rapidly gaining ground. Wireless USB might take some of that market back, but even still, it significantly reduces the number of things people will do with traditional wired USB. The use of USB for hard drives will almost certainly start to wane; it is already almost as cheap to buy a drive case with eSATA as one without, so the chicken-egg problem of eSATA adoption is pretty much taken care of. We'll almost certainly see more major manufacturers adding eSATA in the near future. At that point, there won't be any real reason to continue using USB for hard drives (apart from using it for existing hardware, of course).
The long and the short of it is this: USB's only purpose for existing in the long run is for small, portable devices that need power, e.g. flash sticks that you carry on your keychain. For everything else, the trend is clearly heading towards shared peripherals that you can use in a multi-computer household and towards wireless connectivity in general. I'm definitely not a "cable fanboi" as you put it. In my opinion, at least in the medium term, wires are dead. Cable TV is dead, too, except as a provider of IP networking. They just don't know it yet.
USB 3 will almost definitely be stillborn. Why? Because it offers no real advantages over USB 2 + eSATA. By requiring an optical connection to get the faster speed, USB 3 will almost certainly require substantially greater parts cost than USB 2 in order to get any additional performance, making it significantly more expensive for motherboard and drive vendors to adopt than eSATA, all without offering any advantages over eSATA. Basic rule of consumer economics: higher cost -> fewer purchases. Also, the cables will likely be dramatically more expensive, less flexible, and more fragile, leading to an erosion of consumer confidence.
The most important reason USB 3 is DOA, though, is that there are nearly zero devices out there other than hard drives and Gig-E dongles that can realistically take advantage of the extra bandwidth beyond what USB 2 offers. For storage, eSATA will be firmly entrenched long before USB 3 becomes deployed broadly enough to matter. Since Gig-E dongles are pretty much a niche market, that makes USB 3 a complete non-starter. The potential simply isn't there. Not to mention that if it is designed as badly as USB 2, the CPU hit for high throughput transactions will make people want to throw the drive in a dumpster.
The only thing USB 3 has going for it at all over eSATA is that it provides power for devices, and since powered eSATA is coming later this year, even that "win" in the USB column will be gone. I'm not saying drive manufacturers will stop shipping USB silicon, but if a drive manufacturer is choosing whether to switch from USB 2 to USB 3 or keep selling USB 2 and add eSATA, it's a no-brainer, and USB 3 doesn't stand a chance of winning that battle. Thus, in the long term, eSATA will dominate. It's just a matter of time before USB ports become largely irrelevant, having given way to networked devices, wireless protocols, and eSATA. Anyone who believes otherwise is kidding him/herself.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.